UC San Diego engineer Rene Leonardo Cruz, whose insights about the flow of information led to faster ways of sending everything from brief emails to long movies over the Internet, died June 29th of pancreatic cancer. He passed away at his home in San Diego, at age 54, campus officials said.

Cruz was considered to be remarkably gifted at streamlining the process of distributing data over networks, work that has been of particular help to Internet service providers, physicians who communicate with patients via teleconferencing, and online movie distributors like Netflix. His prize-winning work earned him 39 patents, included one issued in March. His research also enabled him to co-found a local spin-off company, Mushroom Networks.

Cruz "made the art of network design into precise mathematical science," said Rajesh Gupta, dean of UCSD's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

During a career that lasted more than 30 years, Cruz also worked to protect the privacy of consumers. UCSD said in a statement that Cruz "recognized that relying on a few dominant search engines, information aggregators and social networking applications made the free flow of information more vulnerable to manipulation by a central authority. Cruz ... conceived a system, called Grapevine, which enabled participating nodes to exploit network coding to rapidly diffuse information through ad hoc connections – bypassing the need for centralized services."